Professional sports reveals an incredible amount about the culture and age it is the product of. The values, prejudices, and vices of a particular era are shown thus. Pro sports is a scholar’s dream. Spend a day at Anfield or any sports arena on match day and you will learn about economics, history, sociology and pyschology. The ultimate snap shot of what it is to be alive in the 2010 could probably best be told by the results of the World Cup in South Africa. History is just that – a story, and that’s something that all sports fans love.

‘Bigger than Jesus’

And what would a good story be without its characters? Want to write a story about post-war America? The characters you’ll need to know about are Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Cassius Clay. To understand the world today, specifically the western world, look at the big names in the ‘world’s game’. To explore my theory of football as a microcosm of the real world, consider the result of the housing bubble in America. We have all been consumed by the financial disaster and global credit crunch which has since ensued. The number one cause of the economic meltdown was of course greed.

How better to illustrate the waywardness of the West than looking at the shocking scale of greed in topflight football? Every story needs a good guy and a bad guy. The bad guy is Wayne Rooney. The ultimate embodiment of a 21st century athlete. The archetypal footballer and celebrity of the most materialistic society in modern history. 40 foot tall bill boards with his face. Very expensive and over-produced Nike commercials. Tabloids writing up front page headlines every time he farts. Rooney this and Rooney that is nothing unusual, but I believe this is the week that will be the crescendo in the tabloid area of his career. Public fall outs with our protagonist, Sir Alex Ferguson, seem to have that effect. David Beckham has spent his entire life trying to make headlines, but the most publicized incident of his life, other than his affair with Rebecca Loos, was when Fergie kicked a boot into his face (which is only one of the reasons that Ferguson is the good guy) . Despite all the efforts of Manchester United’s many primadonnas and publicity whores to be ‘bigger than Jesus’, no one in modern football has ingrained their image into the collective conscious of football fans more than Ferguson. Anyone who tries to take him on ends up looking like a fly buzzing around the tail of a giant elephant. The reasons why Sir Alex is so respected are simple; he is the antithesis of what our shallow pop culture says men should be like. Humble and loyal, Ferguson embodies old fashioned virtues that everyone, deep down inside their gut, knows to be the correct way for a man to carry himself.

This is the week that Rooneygate has sent the newspapers and everyone involved in the premier league into a kind of frenzy that I’ve never seen in English football. It all started months ago before the world cup, simmering, out of public view. Now everything has been laid bare. Wayne Rooney’s Manchester United career is more or less over- a result of greed, immorality, prostitutes, disloyalty, a ridiculously over inflated ego, and fans who are sick and tired of highly paid professionals behaving with the same level of integrity of a common pick-pocket.

Unhappy with the 90 000 pounds sterling paid to him by his employers every week, Rooney has shown more gall than I’ve ever seen- demanding that Man U pay him in excess of 200 000 a week! Never living up to his potential- he’s made a career out of goals that like look great on a highlight reel, but in reality he goes missing or lets down his team when they need him most. He’s an overrated and overpaid player. But what makes him even more unlikeable, and an outright bad human being is the way that he treats his family. He has publicly cheated on his wife with prostitutes on two separate occasions, the last one being when she was heavily pregnant. The man is truly shameless.

Who is to blame for this? You might expect me to say that society, or Hollywood, or some other part of the media is at fault. But the television shows, movies and rap videos that glamorize crass hedonistic materialism are merely indicative of wider trends. Wayne Rooney is the way that he is because of weak parenting and a lack of scruples. The contempt he has shown for his wife and the lack of respect for the authority of his manager can all be traced to the values (or lack there of) instilled by his family. This can be said for all humans. The childish behavior of misters Rooney,Franc Ribery, Tiger Woods, Brett Favre etc., are I believe related to the break down of family values. That’s not to say that the parents of all these athletes were necessarily the most guilty party in every case, but something, whatever it is, allowed their own vanity to take precedence over their family.

The backlash against Rooney from fans, his teammates, and other managers is refreshing in a way. Too often the bad behaviour of a player is shrugged off as long as he scores goals, or brings in more money to the club. Some Man U supporters took such offence to this whole debacle that they picketed his house. Although, like all tabloid wars, this story will fade away and be replaced by the next player behaving badly, there is something to gleaned from it. Nearly everyone is backing up Sir Alex Ferguson. To me that says people don’t really want what the Rooneys, Beckhams, and Ronaldos of this world represent. We don’t want gold coloured football boots, annoying ring tones, gelled hair and pointless twitters. We want back the world as it’s supposed to be, the one we learnt about in the stories told to us during childhood. A world that puts honour and loyalty ahead of frivolities. We want decency back.

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